Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Review: The Kaiju Movie You Dreamed About
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire offers an impressive spectacle but hollow characters.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire begins with perhaps the hardest pivot possible from 2014's Godzilla, the start of Legendary's MonsterVerse. While Gareth Edwards' kaiju epic built up to Godzilla using his atomic breath in a moment that forced the audience to wait on the edge of their seat to marvel at its power, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire makes sure to have him deploy the ability within minutes of the film starting, killing another Titan in a shower of green goo like it's powered by Nickelodeon's trademark slime. In that moment, which occurs just before the title card, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire wastes no time to make sure audiences are well aware that this movie is not that movie, and it knows exactly why you are here.
Filmmaker Adam Wingard has taken the reins on the MonsterVerse and delivered what audiences have believed they wanted since the start with a beat 'em up, crowd-pleasing blockbuster. Since its inception, this Americanized version of the kaiju has become a multiplex mainstay, and the desire from fans has been to excise as much of the human element as possible and to stick to the gargantuan slugfests. There is a substantial amount of the latter, which would all be cheer-worthy moments on their own, but build toward a final clash that is terrific in its execution.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire does not entirely get rid of the regular people on the call sheet, but pulls back on them considerably and even cuts down the cast size to maybe a third of the other movies in the franchise. Where Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire makes up ground in that regard is by fully committing to its title kaiju as characters. 2021's Godzilla vs Kong really offered the great ape more personality, accentuating his features to give him more human-like mannerisms, and he has now fully become a main character in this story. Full sequences of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire play without dialogue as Kong explores the world and meets kaiju, both friendly and adversarial.
The best new addition of those is Suko, a smaller ape that ends up becoming the Art Carney to Kong's Jackie Gleason, mixing up the dynamic for the kaiju in the same way that Dan Stevens adds a fun flair to the human side of it all. Even Godzilla shows moments of personality that feel like he has grown into his place in this franchise's version of him, like the key man-made landmark he has now claimed as his giant dog bed. Another major strength in the movie's larger "plot" is that it has the Kong story and the main human story mirror each other almost directly, providing a sufficient amount of stakes for both sides so that the breadth of its total picture is clear.
The faults to find in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire are glaring, however, chief among them the film's commitment to continuing its predecessor's descent into the tired storytelling device of the Hollow Earth. Not only do they go harder on this idea, which has deep roots in racist ideologies, but it doubles down on it in ways that viewers familiar with its history will find especially boorish. There is also the hilarious level of goofy exposition that occurs. Though not as frequent as in other MonsterVerse movies, they are deployed clumsily, like a sequence where Rebecca Hall is inexplicably watching a documentary about her own adopted daughter just to make sure audience members are caught up. This feels like the movie not being confident in itself, or rather the studio getting cold feet and falling on bad habits, since so much of the rest of the film maintains a strong sense of personality and confidence.
Another issue throughout Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire occurs as the film explores the Hollow Earth more fully, running into a scaling problem. As the audience, we are fully aware that Kong is huge, so when he is adjacent to a large rock or crossing a bridge made of bones, we know that these are also big, but without the scale of a regular human or something we can quantify, the impact of the picture loses its power. Those moments where the chaos and fighting return to the surface, and landmarks and people are present to give it all proportion, are Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire's blockbuster filmmaking at its best.
An unfairness that will no doubt work against Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is that it is being released just months after the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One. That film was a somber reflection on Japan responding to the country's post-war rebuilding through the lens of a terrorizing kaiju, while Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is akin to a Saturday morning cartoon best accompanied by sugary cereal. Though the stark contrast here might immediately conjure contrived feelings of superiority for one or the other, what the Godzilla franchise has largely proven over the past 70 years is that these are not opposing interpretations but rather two sides of the same coin. Dark, gloomy, and mournful Godzilla can exist alongside playful, colorful, and mischievous Godzilla. Preferences will still certainly abound, but the world is big enough for both, and how lucky we are to have films that harken both to the likes of Ishirō Honda's 1954 original Godzilla and Ishirō Honda's 1975 sequel Terror of Mechagodzilla.
When George Miller was promoting Mad Max: Fury Road, he spoke about a quote from Alfred Hitchcock wherein the legendary director said he wanted films that work where the audience doesn't have to read the subtitles, the implication being that as long as your visual storytelling is solid, you've done your job. Now, five movies in, the MonsterVerse has found its first real entry that abides by this principle. The sequel carries itself on its visual spectacle that not only defines and pushes its narrative but also commits to the vast canvas that it promises.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the movie that fans have thought they wanted for the past 10 years. Monster fights and IMAX-sized visuals are delivered to a dizzying degree, while the handful of characters who are present are largely around to just spout off NPC-level dialogue so that you're totally aware of why something is about to happen or why someone is about to show up. You're not going to remember the moments where a human said a dumb line for two seconds since you just saw a giant lizard suplex a giant ape into the sand, which is what the movie itself is more invested in.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire hits theaters on March 29th.
